Lower productivity by using a rotary num pad

[Maximilian Ernestus] sent us a quick little demo that shows him using a rotary phone dial as a num pad. We’re often frustrated when notebooks and netbooks prohibit us from using our mad 10-key skills (alternate key mapping doesn’t count). This makes coding and using GnuCash undesirable on small form factor portables.

Instead of fixing the problem, [Maximilian] made it worse by interfacing a rotary phone as a num pad. An Arduino counts the pulses and feeds them to the computer via a serial connection. From there it’s just a bit of software handling to issue a keypress. He mentions that a future version should register as a USB keyboard. This is a great opportunity to ditch the Arduino and use the V-USB library.

Want to dig a bit deeper into this old technology? Don’t miss out on the information available from the Magic Phone hack.

Really? I’m not an Arduino hater (hell, it’s been ages since I was an electronics hobbyist), but sometimes this stuff is just ridiculous. How much does Atmel pay Hackaday for all the publicity? How soon will it be when every Hackaday post simply reads:

Productive people always assign a dollar value to their time. If one beleives their time is worth, say $40 an hour, that person would not mow their own lawn, instead they would hire a gardner for $20 hour. Now, if the use of this rotary encoder consumes 10 extra hours of time over the course of a year’s use then the “cost” is $400 to implement. Take this same device and give it to an impoverished person (whose value is $0 per hour) and you now have a savings of $400! Adoption of this technology in low income areas could save billions of dollars. Any investors out there?

This is a patently silly idea. The idea is that people will get hooked on a particular brand name and when they get a real job doing what they were doing when they were hacking for fun that brand loyalty will translate into “industrial/consumer product sales.”

Did you ever stop to think about why it is that semiconductor companies give away so many free samples?

cool hack, maybe could translate into some sort of homebrew accessibility gadgets…

Would like to say, though, that these old phones are so well-built that it’s a shame to use them up for hacks. I have a Western Electric from the ’50s mounted on the wall in my office. Great phone that’ll last until the heat death of the universe, and it’s so clear and crisp that it gives me chills.. just only sayin’

I use arduinos, if you want to convince me, recommend something in the next price bracket up for me to learn and I shall, just don’t bash it without a decent follow up with suggested options – cunt nose :)

My personal distaste for Arduino overkill is not that you can do it a price bracket upwards with even more misapplied sophistication, but one or two orders of magnitude cheaper, and several orders of device complexity lower, with a single transistor in many cases… i.e. Arduino turns lights on when it’s dark etc etc etc. There’s terabytes of $50 solutions to 50c problems out there now. Sure, you’re chuffed about your “hello world” test run, but it’s not the most frackin’ awesomest thing you can do with an arduino evarrr.

RW222s law of Arduino parsimony… if it can be built with 3 or less discrete semiconductors (Including transistors, standard logic, 741s, 555s etc) then it’s a training wheels project and shouldn’t be promoted as the best thing since sliced silicon. That’s not including output drivers or voltage conversion. Which in some cases an Arduino might actually need more of, vs more parsimonious discrete device selection.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t skip nearly as many hackaday articles when it really only was updated once or a very lucky twice a day, and most of those were stuff like railguns and experiments in walking robots…

Now if you strap an arduino to a toaster you’ll get a writeup from hackaday. Double-length post if it runs some kind of open-source software.

@Jeff No phone has to really die here with this project. all that is need from the phone is 2 wire connects at the wall end of the phone cable.

Beyond that comments here at Hackaday are still retaining their pattern. Those not doing anything, or if they are they aren’t sharing it are still complaining out those who are both doing something and sharing it. In addition to complaining about those finding the projects.